First aid quick reference

⚠What this page is

A reference to act on before professional help arrives and while you are getting it — not a substitute for it. The authority for any particular product is section 4 of its own safety data sheet, and the authority for a person is a doctor. Nothing here replaces calling for help; several entries below tell you to call for help as the first action rather than the last.

The reason a course about chemistry carries a first-aid page is that the useful window is short and the decisions are made badly under stress. What follows is the small number of actions that are sourced, general and worth knowing before you need them.

Before you start: what has to be within reach

Every practical page in this course assumes these four things are in the room, and a page cannot assume them into existence.

Eyewash provision. The recognised standard for plumbed emergency eyewash, ANSI/ISEA Z358.1, requires an installation to deliver flushing fluid to both eyes for fifteen minutes, to have a valve that opens in one second or less and stays open until deliberately closed, to be reachable within ten seconds of the exposure point, and to deliver tepid fluid, which the standard defines as a temperature conducive to a fifteen-minute irrigation and gives as 16 to 38 °C. Almost no home darkroom has that. What HSE’s first-aid guidance offers instead, for the case where mains tap water is not readily available for eye irrigation, is at least one litre of sterile water or sterile normal saline (0.9 per cent) in sealed, disposable containers, with two conditions that are routinely broken: once a seal is broken the container is not kept for reuse, and containers are not used beyond their expiry date. Buy enough that a fifteen-minute irrigation is arithmetically possible, and check the dates when you check the smoke alarm.

A spill kit suited to the reagents in use, with new gloves in it, because the gloves you are wearing when something spills are the contaminated ones.

The safety data sheet for every product, printed or downloaded, in a known place. Section 4 is first aid and it is product-specific. Reading it for the first time during an incident is too late, and searching for it on a phone with one contaminated hand is worse.

A telephone, and the numbers already written down. In the United Kingdom that is 999 for an emergency and 111 for urgent advice when you are not sure. Numbers differ everywhere and this course does not list them for jurisdictions it has not checked; write yours on the card below.

The first minute

What to do first, whatever the substance

1. 11. Stop the exposurePut down what you are holding. Step away from the tray or the fume. If a garment is soaked, it is still in contact and comes off.
2. 22. Get water onto it, and keep it thereFor eye and skin, the action is irrigation and the mistake is stopping too soon. Fifteen minutes for an eye is the figure the eyewash standard is built around; twenty minutes of cool running water is the figure the NHS gives for a burn.
3. 33. Call while you are rinsing, not afterRinsing and calling are not sequential. A chemical burn, a chemical in the eye, a swallowed chemical or any breathing difficulty is a call now, with someone else dialling if there is someone else.
4. 44. Bring the container or the sheetThe GHS statement P101 exists for this: if medical advice is needed, have the product container or label at hand. A photograph of the label counts.
5. 55. Write it down afterwardsWhat, how much, how strong, how long the contact was, what you did and when. You will not remember accurately in an hour and it is the information the next clinician asks for.

The order matters more than the detail: exposure stopped, water on, help called, identity of the substance carried with the person.

By route

In the eye

Irrigate immediately, with the eyelids held open, and keep going. The current GHS response statement for the two serious eye classifications, H314 and H318, is P305+P354+P338: IF IN EYES: Immediately rinse with water for several minutes. Remove contact lenses if present and easy to do. Continue rinsing. For the lesser classification H319 the statement is P305+P351+P338, which says rinse cautiously. The difference between “immediately” and “cautiously” is a real one and it is the difference between a corrosive and an irritant.

“Several minutes” is the label’s wording. Fifteen minutes is the number to work to, because that is what the eyewash standard is designed to deliver and it comes from the medical judgement that a fifteen-minute flush provides emergency first-aid mitigation of a corrosive or caustic splash. It will feel far longer than necessary. Stopping early is the commonest failure.

Then seek medical advice, with the safety data sheet or the container. An eye splash of anything corrosive is not a wait-and-see injury.

On the skin

P303+P361+P353 — IF ON SKIN (or hair): take off immediately all contaminated clothing; rinse skin with water or shower. Clothing first, because a soaked cuff holds the chemical against skin for as long as it stays on. For an irritant rather than a corrosive the statement is P302+P352, wash with plenty of water.

Contaminated clothing is washed before it is worn again (P362+P364), and gloves are rinsed before they come off, which is Kodak’s instruction and the reason the removal sequence exists.

If the skin is burned, the NHS’s general burns guidance applies: hold the area under cool running water for 20 minutes, as soon as possible and within three hours; remove clothing and jewellery near the area but never anything stuck to it; once cooled, lay cling film over the injury rather than wrapping it round. Do not put creams, oils or butter on it, do not use plasters or sticky dressings, and do not burst blisters. And the sentence that decides the whole question for a darkroom: a burn caused by an acid or a chemical is a 999 or accident-and-emergency injury, not a home one.

Breathed in

P304+P340 — IF INHALED: remove person to fresh air and keep comfortable for breathing. For the respiratory sensitisers the statement is P342+P316: if experiencing respiratory symptoms, get emergency medical help immediately.

Most darkroom inhalation incidents are an irritant gas from an incompatible pair — sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, chlorine — and the incompatibility matrix is where those come from. Two things follow. Leave the room and ventilate it from outside rather than going back in to open a window; and do not return to deal with the spill until the reaction has stopped and the air has changed, in new gloves and eye protection.

Swallowed

The one instruction this course quotes is the one that is class-specific: P301+P330+P331, IF SWALLOWED: rinse mouth. Do NOT induce vomiting, which is the statement assigned to H314, the corrosive classification. For everything else, section 4 of the sheet for that product governs, and the course does not print a general rule, because the right action for a corrosive and the right action for a systemic poison are different and choosing wrongly is worse than doing nothing but calling.

Get emergency medical help (P316) and take the container.

Cut

Glass and craft knives are in this course as much as chemistry is, and a freshly cut sheet of glass will go through a nitrile glove. The NHS’s guidance for cuts and grazes is the reference: stop the bleeding with firm pressure, clean the wound, cover it, and know the signs that mean medical attention. A cut sustained with chemistry on the hands is also a contamination event: irrigate it as well as dressing it, and say so when you seek help.

The delayed injuries

Not everything announces itself in the first minute, and two of the course’s substances are specifically the kind that do not.

Sensitisation. HSE’s account is that it may take weeks, months or years to appear; that once a person is sensitised, tiny amounts of the allergen trigger a reaction; and that the only remedy then is to prevent further exposure. Metol and hydroquinone carry H317, allergic skin reaction. Recurring dermatitis on the hands of somebody who develops film is not a coincidence and is not treated by scrubbing harder — it is a control failure, and the control that failed is usually the one at the point where gloves come off.

Silver staining. A grey-black stain from silver nitrate appears hours after the contact, not at the moment of it. The stain is not the injury; it is the record of an exposure you did not notice, and its lesson is about the glove and the tongs rather than about the mark.

Eye irritation that persists has its own statement, P337+P317: if eye irritation persists, get medical help. Irritation that is still there the next morning is not settling down.

The card to fill in and put on the wall

The fields below are the ones that make the difference between “I checked” and “I remember checking”. Two of them — the version or reference and the revision date — are the ones people omit, and they are what tells you whether the advice you are following is the advice that now applies. A sheet’s section 16 carries the revision date; section 1 or the footer carries the version.

Field	Fill in	Why
Product name	Exactly as printed on the container	Trade names cover several substances and one substance has several trade names
Supplier, and manufacturer if different		The supplier is who you ask for the sheet
Grade and strength	e.g. “glacial”, “37 % w/w”, “2 % v/v made up here”	A dilution you made yourself has no sheet of its own
SDS version or reference	From section 1 or the footer	Two sheets for the same product can give different first-aid wording
SDS revision date	From section 16	GHS Rev. 11 changed the eye-splash statement for corrosives; an older sheet says something else
Date you read it		Turns a claim into a checkable one
Where the file is	A dated PDF in a folder beats a link	Links rot; you will want it offline and in a hurry
Signal word and hazard statements	Copied from the label	So the card says what kind of injury to expect
Section 4 in one line	The product’s own first-aid instruction	This is the line that overrides everything on this page
Emergency numbers	Yours, for where you are	999 and 111 in the United Kingdom; the course does not guess elsewhere

📓Do this once, for each product, when it arrives

Fill the card when you unpack the bottle, not when you need it. Then re-check when you reorder from a different supplier, when a product’s packaging changes, and when a page in this course states a classification you did not expect. Re-reading a sheet is the cheapest safety action available and almost nobody does it twice.

What this page does not tell you, and why

It gives no product-specific first aid. Section 4 of your sheet does that, and it differs between a fixer and a concentrated alkali in ways a shared page cannot capture.

It gives no antidotes and no neutralising treatments. Putting a weak acid on an alkali burn is a plausible-sounding idea that the course has found no tier 1 or tier 2 support for as first aid, and the sources it has read say water, at length. Water is the instruction.

It gives no respirator specification. The course has not been able to source a filter class for a home darkroom, and does not invent one; where a page needs respiratory protection beyond a disposable dust mask for a weighing operation, that page says what it could not establish.

It gives no air-change figure for a domestic room. HSE’s control sheet for manual film development names general ventilation above five air changes an hour with a through draught, for a workplace; the course has not found a figure it can stand behind for a converted bathroom, and says so rather than transferring one.

It does not list emergency numbers outside the United Kingdom. That is not evasion, it is the same rule as the disposal caveat: where the answer depends on where you are, the course tells you what to go and find rather than guessing which country you are in.